


Assorted Cutlery

by draculard



Category: Knives Out (2019)
Genre: Canon-Typical Racism, Case Fic, Developing Friendships, F/M, Ficlets, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Male-Female Friendship, Murder Mystery, Poisoning, The Thrombeys just being Thrombeys, herpetology, self-confidence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-09
Updated: 2020-03-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:35:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23083312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: Knives, forks, spoons — how Benoit and Marta get on together after the Thrombeys are thrown out.
Relationships: Benoit Blanc & Marta Cabrera, Benoit Blanc/Marta Cabrera, Marta Cabrera & Harlan Thrombey
Comments: 31
Kudos: 136





	1. Knives

“They were my friends,” Marta said. Her eyes were glassy; she stared down at Harlan’s favorite mug, cradling it in her hands. There was a chip on the rim, and it bit into the pad of her thumb as she caressed it, absent-mindedly relishing the roughness, the friction; it wasn’t quite pain.

Blanc didn’t deign to answer her. Like Marta, he was fiddling with his silver coin, letting the edge of it dig into his thumb. Unlike Marta, his eyes were sharp, focused.

Fixed on her.

She didn’t see him staring; she spoke like a woman talking to herself, or like a parrot repeating something it’s heard a hundred times. “They treated me like—”

“Family?” Blanc finished. “I’ve heard that one before. Darling, if you were a dog, they’d have drowned you before you learned to walk.” 

She whipped her head around to stare at him. He set the old coin down on the table before him with a clink and met her eyes steadily, unflinching.

And why should _he_ flinch? He was just like Harlan in that way — making the boldest moves and neither hesitating before nor apologizing after. Perhaps the only difference was that (so far, at least) Blanc didn’t tip the Go board over when things got out of hand. 

“You don’t know what it’s like,” said Marta finally, dispassionately. “There are some families who think they’re the masters and they treat you like a dog. But the difference between a family who loves their dog and a family who mistreats it—”

“The difference,” said Blanc, waving one hand dismissively, “is you catch more flies with honey. They treat you like a dog they hate and you fight back, you leave. Suddenly they’ve got no dog. They treat you like a dog they _love,_ however, and they convince you that you _are_ a dog.”

Marta turned, then, away from Harlan’s knife display — now ever-so-slightly marred — and looked at Blanc in his armchair, slouching near the piano like he belonged there. Like any of them belonged there.

“You’re saying …” Marta said, and hesitated. She ran her thumb over the chipped mug. “What are you saying?”

He was impossible to read. His eyes flicked from her face to the mug in her hands and then, without pausing, to the display of knives.

To the broken spire where Ransom’s stage dagger had been.

“I’m saying you’re not Harlan Thrombey’s nurse anymore, Marta,” Blanc said. When his eyes dragged back to her, he was smiling. Just slightly. “And you were never a dog.”

* * *

It felt wrong to throw all of Harlan’s things away, so she didn’t. She left his ugly marionettes around the house, even dusted them from time to time; his books were still displayed on the shelves — hundreds of hardcovers with their dust jackets untouched, some of them sporting titles in thirty different languages, some of them adorned with garish cover art and others graced with subtle, impactful design.

She remembered which ones he loved and which he hated. She remembered which ones he argued over with Walt. Most authors didn’t get to pick and choose their cover designs, and Harlan knew that, and he was thankful for it — most of the time. But it didn’t stop him from getting into fights from time to time. 

_You should be grateful,_ Walt said once. They’d been whisper-shouting in the sitting room over tea, where Walt thought Marta couldn’t hear him and Harlan knew she could. It was all about the 50th Anniversary edition of _Every January_ — not Harlan’s first novel, but the one that made him famous. 

Walt wanted it annotated. Harlan obliged, including sly notes here and there, lambasting his own writing skills as they were at age thirty. Walt wanted a new introduction and had selected James Patterson as the all-too-willing writer of it; Harlan combatted this with Patricia Cornwell, who was no more reluctant than Patterson, and Walt agreed.

Where the argument came into play was the cover design. Walt set his teacup down with a clatter, grabbed the poster from behind his chair and held it up, beaming like a child, the over-sized mock-up half-covering his face. He peeked around the edge, saw his father’s face, saw Harlan’s hands frozen in the middle of buttering a croissant. His smile died.

_You don’t like it?_

_I have no quarrel with the artwork,_ said Harlan evenly. _I only want to know who it is._

It was a beautiful painting, really — far more eye-catching than the minimalist designs in fashion at most publishing houses. Looking at it, Marta was hard-pressed to find an issue with it. 

Only…

 _The protagonist of_ Every January _is Dr. Kendra Warwick,_ said Harlan, and this time there was a little more ice in his voice. 

Bewildered, Walt craned his neck and angled the poster so he and Harlan could both see it at the same time. _Yeah,_ he said. _Yeah — Dad, that’s her._

 _That is_ not _her,_ said Harlan firmly.

Awkwardly — and for the first time ever — Marta found herself in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with Walt, not with Harlan. She knew exactly how this argument was going to go, and all she could do was stare at her feet, face flushed with an emotion she couldn’t identify but very much didn’t enjoy.

 _Dr. Kendra Warwick,_ said Harlan judiciously, _is a woman in her sixties. She is described_ how _, Walt?_

Walt stammered a little. He didn’t answer.

 _She is described as Black Irish in heritage,_ said Harlan. _Did you perhaps misunderstand those words? Do you know what Black Irish means?_

 _I know what it means,_ said Walt.

Stomach twisting, throat tightening, Marta looked up at the poster again.

 _I just thought—_ Walt said, red-faced and sweating. _I mean, Dad, well, look at J.K. Rowling, you know? Nobody had a problem with Hermione being white back in the day, but_ now _… it’s just there_ is _a bit of criticism, you know, about the — how do I say it—_

He looked around the room for answers, caught sight of Marta, jolted in her seat. Then, predictably, his eyes widened in delight and he held out his hand to her, gesturing for her to join the conversation. To take his side.

 _It’s just they’re not very diverse,_ Walt said brightly, emboldened by her presence. _Right, Marta? They’re very white. Doing a cover like this, especially for the Big Fifty, it’s gonna draw in all sorts of new readers in the black audience, in an audience you never had before._

Harlan didn’t glance back at her. He scraped his butter knife against the saucer in his hand, methodically cleaning it. He was glaring daggers at Walt.

 _You seem to think,_ he said eventually, _you have some sort of say in my books._

This was where things got ugly, truly ugly. Marta couldn’t remember afterward the exact wording used, the precise flow of the conversation. She remembered four things:

She remembered Walt’s words, _You should be grateful,_ and Harlan’s heated response — Grateful for my own books? Grateful for the money I’ve earned myself? Grateful for the publishing company I started and gave to you as a gift, Walt? Grateful for what?

She remembered Harlan’s butter knife clattering to the floor, the blade bouncing off polished boards. It skittered under the sofa a moment later, kicked there by accident by Walt — Harlan — one of them as he stood.

She remembered herself staring at the cover art for _Every January,_ looking under her eyelashes at the beautiful woman they’d chosen as Kendra Warwick: twenty-six at the oldest, not sixty-three; svelte and tall, not short and dumpy as Kendra was described; and black.

As in African-American.

As in, not Black Irish at all. 

She remembered looking at Harlan, her Go partner, her friend. An intelligent man, a kind man. A man who treated her like family.

Her stomach twisted again. She left the room. 

* * *

She heard Blanc’s car pull up the drive, but never saw it emerging from the woods. She realized a moment later, with just a hint of irritation, that he must have pulled off the road just before the statue of the elephant. He’d be waiting there for her, perhaps — or else he’d be approaching from the gate.

It was impossible to guess which; she flipped a coin and met him at the gate. He glanced up as she approached, quirked his lips in a smile, but didn’t stand; he was lounging on the low garden wall, his back against the same stones Ransom had walked over that night, his face turned up to the sun.

Marta glanced at his hands, saw the twig and the pocketknife. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Extending an invitation,” Blanc said. As always, his drawl marred his words to the point where Marta could barely understand him. In a minute, she’d adjust. For now, she furrowed her eyebrows and sussed it out.

“An invitation to what?”

He cocked an eyebrow, but didn’t look her way again. Gradually, she joined him on the wall, sitting near his head only because she assumed he wouldn’t move. But he did, immediately — no sooner had she lowered herself onto the stones then he sat up and made room for her so they could sit side-by-side.

She watched him bend his head over the twig. Quickly, efficiently — using only the edge of his blade — he scraped the bark off it, revealing the fresh, green wood underneath.

“You’re just being destructive for no reason, then,” said Marta. She wasn’t sure whether she was more amused or outraged. 

Blanc didn’t answer. He dug the tip of the knife blade into the end of the twig; carefully, he cut into the wood, peeling a thin sliver from the top. He stopped abruptly, halfway down the length of the wood, and rotated the twig to start again.

Gradually, a shape took form. More and more slivers peeled down from the top, curling over each other, until suddenly the bit of wood poking up above those slivers was little more than a splinter. Blanc twisted it off and tossed it away; his hands were so large and looked so clumsy that Marta was surprised he didn’t crush the twig in the process.

He glanced at her. He half-smiled. He looked back down.

He made two deft cuts and suddenly it all came into place.

“There’s a case, isn’t there?” Marta said, scrutinizing him. The pale blue eyes. The laugh lines, the curve of his lips. “And you want my help. Why?”

“Now, surely you know the answer to that question,” Blanc said, and he handed the twig to her.

It wasn’t a twig anymore. The thin, curling slivers of wood he’d cut from the top were now petals; the two sharp cuts he’d made at the end had formed leaves; the rest of the twig was a thin stem, whittled down by Blanc’s expert knife. The whole thing was no longer than Marta’s little finger; it laid weightlessly in her palm, rustling just a little in the breeze.

When she looked up, he’d raised her eyebrows at her.

“Yes?” he asked. 

Marta looked down at the flower. She plucked it out of the palm of her hand carefully and put it in her buttonhole. “Yes,” she said.

Still not quite smiling — still not frowning, either — Blanc folded his pocketknife with a snick and put it away. He stood from the garden wall, brushing his trousers off, extended his hand to Marta.

“Then come, Watson,” he said when she put her hand in his. “The game’s afoot.”


	2. Forks

They walked silently, with Harlan’s left arm hooked around Marta’s right, through the woods on his estate. It was early autumn — warm still, or warm enough for a walk, at least — and the trees were, for the most part, a pleasant mix of orange, red, and purple. They turned the corner, stepping in unison over a maple limb which had fallen over the path, and stopped immediately.

Before them, looking them right in the eye, was a statue of a polar bear. East of the polar bear was a continuation of the path they were on. West of the polar bear was another path.

“Wait,” said Marta, “this is from that book of yours, isn’t it?”

She looked sideways at Harlan, who looked back at her with a facial shrug.

“Oh, come on,” Marta said. “It is, isn’t it?”

“I’m afraid I can’t recall,” said Harlan. “Getting old.”

“Come off it.”

“These statues came with the property, I believe,” said Harlan, putting on what he liked to call his Village Buffoon face. “Some say they’ve been here for centuries.”

Marta rolled her eyes at that and turned her attention back to the two paths and the polar bear between them. “So what’s the gimmick?” she asked. “Let me guess — we go left and we find an eccentric, wealthy man dead on the ground. And this is his maze he built to protect his property from outsiders, yes? And down the other path, if we take it, his identical twin brother. The murderer, lying in wait.”

Harlan scoffed. “You clearly haven’t read the book.”

“I don’t read _popular fiction,_ ” said Marta, making sure to use the same voice Walt used when talking about Dan Brown and Stephen King. Harlan did his best to look unamused.

“So which is it?” he asked. “East or west?”

Marta examined the paths again, humoring him. “Two paths diverged in a yellow wood,” she mused. “I say we go east.”

Harlan turned to her, eyebrows raised. “Hundreds of generations of full Cabrera blood in you,” he said disapprovingly, “and you, when presented with a forking path, choose a Frost reference over Borges.”

“West, then,” said Marta, tugging on his arm. “If you insist.”

“I insist on no such thing,” said Harlan, tugging on _her_ arm in turn. “West is where all the booby traps are. You’d know that, by the way, if you ever read my books.”

It was Marta’s turn to scoff, but she acquiesced. The eastern path was to their left, and she remembered that this was how she’d made it through funhouse mazes as a child. One always stuck to the left, and that always got one through the labyrinth in time.

East they went.

* * *

Their first case together — not counting the almost-murder of Harlan Thrombey, naturally — took place in an ornate room with walls and ceilings made of glass. Outside, it was surrounded by the owner’s ancestral orchards, the trees of which had fallen into some disrepair. Apple trees sagged over one another and grew within each other’s bounds, roots fighting for sustenance. Fruit littered the ground, giving the entire property a sickly, rotten odor. At the edge of the orchard, a red sign — _Keep America Great: Trump 2020_ — had been hammered right into the roots of the oldest apple tree.

Inside, the glass walls were lined with cages. The cages were lined with snakes. 

It was an unpleasant place, Marta thought, inside and out. She liked snakes, actually — she’d freaked Alice out when they were children by catching a garter snake, and she’d done the same to Meg once, quite by accident, when Harlan was still alive. But it was one thing to see snakes in the wild — or to see a single snake in a single tank — and quite another to be surrounded by them on all sides.

Forked tongues hissed out of mouths all around the room. Scaly coils slithered around and over each other, filling the chamber with—

“Quite the uncanny susurrus, is it not?” Blanc said, removing his sunglasses to peer at a buttermilk racer in the tank nearest to him.

Yes, that. An uncanny susurrus.

“One gets used to it,” said the new owner of the snakes. He was clasping his hands, scrubbing them anxiously almost like he was washing them without soap or water. His nails, Marta noticed, shone ever-so-slightly, as if they’d been brushed over with a transparent veneer.

“You inherited these from your brother, yes?” said Blanc. 

“Yes. Indeed. From Julien.”

Blanc pointed to Marta without looking her way and, dutifully, she opened her notepad and poised her pen above the paper, ready to take notes. Blanc, meanwhile, leaned against a disused and out-of-tune grand piano in the center of the greenhouse; it was strewn with loose papers, bags of cypress mulch, and a small cooler filled with frozen mice.

“James N. Fiona,” he said, “semi-professional herpetologist. Time of death—”

“Jim,” said Julien Fiona. “He went by Jim.”

Blanc glanced at him, then at Marta. His mouth twisted.

“Jim,” said Marta, writing it down. “Got it.”

“Time of death between one-fifty and three-thirty a.m.,” said Blanc, “based on testimony from Mr. Fiona’s assistant, who left him here at one-fifty, and Mr. Fiona’s twin brother—” He gestured toward Julien. “—who found him dead at three-thirty-three.”

“Yes,” said Marta, inclining her head. 

“Assistant’s name: Liam Cecil,” said Blanc. He glanced at Julien, who was looking queasy. “You fond of snakes, Mr. Fiona?”

Julien’s eyes darted around the room. He seemed equally cautious of the venomous saw-scaled viper in a tank to Marta’s left and the harmless buttermilk racer next to Blanc. “No,” he said. “No, not at all. I’ll be glad to get rid of them.”

“Certainly,” said Blanc. “Especially considering your brother’s cause of death, no?”

“Yes.”

“You and your brother are fraternal?” Blanc asked, changing the subject so quickly Marta couldn’t help but be suspicious. She looked up from her notepad briefly, narrowing her eyes at Blanc. He pretended not to see.

“Identical,” Julien corrected as Blanc moved away from the piano.

“Identical,” Blanc repeated. Marta took his place, careful to avoid the uncovered keyboard as she examined the papers on James Fiona’s makeshift desk. It was correspondence, mostly; she caught sight of a ripped envelope with a Swedish postmark, caught sight of a letter, picked out the words _viper_ … _much admire_ … _his_ _indiscretions_ … _sale._

“I see,” said Blanc to Julien. “Only it’s hard to tell, you understand, considering…”

Julien’s face was white. His eyes flicked down past Blanc’s shoes, to the spot in the middle of the chamber where his brother’s body had been found. “Yes,” he said weakly.

“I saw the photos,” said Blanc commiseratingly. “Dreadful, weren’t they? Yes, indeed. Now, tell me, Mr. Fiona, is there any poison — any _venom,_ that is — which causes those symptoms?” He gestured vaguely at his own face. “Swelling?” he said. “Discoloration?”

“I—” said Julien, glancing nervously at the buttermilk racer again. “I wouldn’t know, I — that was rather Jim’s area, you see.”

“And what do you do for a living, Mr. Fiona?”

At this, Julien’s lips stopped trembling and formed a slightly more confident line. “I’m a hairdresser,” he said.

“Ah,” said Blanc. “A man of true insight into the human soul.”

Julien didn’t get the chance to answer. The next moment, Blanc had pulled a photo from his jacket and leaped past Marta to shove it into Julien’s face. Marta reared back to get out of their way, and as she did so, she got a glimpse of a man’s face, eyes open and staring, the rest of him horribly disfigured. Swollen and discolored, alright.

“Your brother, yes?” Blanc said.

“Ye—” Julien said, and the rest of his words were lost as he hit the ground with a thud.

Marta stared down at the body, stifling a gasp. Blanc turned and looked at her nonetheless, his own surprise evident on his face.

“Why, our nervy little coiffeuse has fainted,” Blanc said.

Marta’s instincts took over before the words were fully out of Blanc’s mouth. She dropped the pen and notepad with a clatter and dove to her knees at Julien’s side, checking first his pulse and then his eyes.

“He _did_ faint?” Blanc said, this time doubtfully. Marta glanced over her shoulder at him.

“Yes,” she said. “He’s unconscious.”

“You’re sure?”

She looked down at Julien, hesitating just a moment. It was all Blanc needed, evidently. He was at her side the next moment, kneeling and taking Julien’s hand in the same movement. Marta almost missed the gleam of a sharp instrument in his hand.

“Hey!” she said, smacking Blanc away from Julien — too late, she saw. There was a dot of blood on Julien’s palm. Blanc held the thumbtack carefully away from Marta, making sure not to prick her even as she pushed him. “You can’t just go around stabbing people with thumbtacks!”

“He didn’t feel a thing,” said Blanc, and this, at least, seemed to be true. Julien hadn’t flinched; his eyelids hadn’t even fluttered. He was well and truly knocked out. “You know what this means, yes?”

Marta glanced at Julien again. The restive face, the open hands, the blood on his palm and the photo of his dead brother on the floor nearby.

She looked questioningly at Blanc. All around them, snakes hissed and slithered in their cages.

“Come,” said Blanc. “Let’s take a walk.” 

* * *

They absconded to the orchards outside, leaving Julien Fiona in the capable hands of a local policeman, who had parked them both in a sitting room and was patiently feeding Julien ice water to brace him against the shock. Outside, Marta took as many deep breaths of fresh spring air as she could without getting light-headed; she was desperate to chase away the smell of hundreds of caged snakes.

“Interesting, isn’t it?” Blanc said as they pushed through the apple trees, each of them stepping carefully to avoid the fallen fruit. “Robert Fiona plants an apple orchard in 1941, mating his own strains of apples in the hothouse back there. 

“His famous apples make the family rich, but what does his son do? Rather than maintain the orchard, Martin Fiona allows it to fall into disuse and his wife Eileen, famed pianist, guts the greenhouse and uses it as a music room, where her twin sons were educated in piano and violin.

“Now adults, and well-educated both in apple husbandry and music, what do Julien and James do? One becomes a hairdresser, abandoning the family home altogether. The other becomes a herpetologist and guts the greenhouse once again, this time filling it floor-to-ceiling with recondite reptiles.”

He ducked under a sagging bough, tilting his head as he did so to avoid a misshapen apple which hung in his path. Marta followed — though she didn’t need to duck to avoid anything, considering how much shorter she was — and nearly rolled her ankle on a pile of similarly ugly apples beneath her feet. 

The orchard gave way to a forest. The apples continued for several yards, rolled there by scavenging animals or blown there by angry winds.

“Julien Fiona claims he last saw his brother at one-fifteen a.m., when James stood in the doorway of his reptile room, saying goodnight to the assistant Liam Cecil,” Blanc said, lighting a cigar as he maneuvered over roots and rotten apples. 

“Yes,” said Marta, “but he claims to have discovered the body, as well … yet he believed you when you showed him that photo of a disfigured corpse you pulled off the Internet.”

“Most curious,” Blanc agreed. “Believed me so thoroughly, in fact, that he fainted at the very sight of it! He made no mention of fainting upon discovery; one might assume the sight of a non-disfigured corpse in real life would be more upsetting than a disfigured one seen only in a photograph.”

“Meaning he never saw the body to begin with,” said Marta. “He didn’t faint at the sight of it because he never saw it, and he did faint at the sight of the photograph because he had no way of knowing it wasn’t James.”

“He’s covering for someone, of course,” said Blanc. “And the answer is rather obvious.”

“Liam,” said Marta, almost disappointed at how quickly the details had fallen into place.

“Quite so,” said Blanc. “Liam Cecil, who did not leave the house at one-fifteen, and who did discover the body because, quite simply, he was there when James Fiona died.”

“But how did he do it?” asked Marta. “And why?”

“One might think a venomous snake bite,” said Blanc, “considering the lividity of his skin and the two puncture wounds found on his hand. However…”

“However,” Marta said, brow furrowed, “Liam Cecil had the same two puncture wounds. The exact same size. And none of the venomous snakes in James’s little zoo back there had fangs small enough to match.”

Suddenly they stopped. Blanc stared at the path ahead of them, hands in his pockets and cigar wedged between his teeth. Marta looked down the left branch of the path and then down the right with an air of deja vu. 

“ _Dejo a los varios porvenires_ — _no a todos_ — _mi jardín de senderos que se bifurcan_ ,” she said. 

Blanc looked at her askance. For a moment — just a moment — Marta felt Harlan’s arm tucked into hers, felt his familiar warmth and frailty as he smiled at her.

“I leave to various futures — not to all — my garden of forking paths,” Marta translated, face flushed. “Jorge Luis Borges.”

Blanc stared at her a moment longer before he finally removed the cigar from between his lips and blew out a perfect ring of smoke. “I’d have gone with Frost, myself,” he said dryly. “Two paths diverged in a yella wood, and all that. But the significance is not lost on me, Marta.”

Significance? What significance? It was only a quote, only meant to draw attention to the path before them. Nothing more.

Blanc turned back to the orchard, squinting through it to the greenhouse and the reptiles inside.

“Let’s go find out how and why,” he said.

* * *

“That’s not a snake,” said Marta. Blanc stood next to her, bending at the waist to peer into the tank, his shoulder brushing hers. He was exuding warmth, even through his thick coat.

“Indeed not,” he said. The tank was filled with soft earth; on top of this earth, lying dead as a doornail, was what appeared to be a giant earthworm. Its body was covered in ring-shaped folds instead of scales; its skin was dark and smooth, with no scales. “Marta,” said Blanc, pulling away from the tank to look at the others around them, “did you see any other dead snakes — that is, snakes and snake-like creatures — here?”

Marta took a moment to think of it, but was already certain of the answer. “No. This is the only one.”

Blanc held his hand out to her, palm up. “Your pen, please, Marta.”

She handed it to him and, in the next second, helped him remove the glass top from the worm-like creature’s tank. Blanc stood on his tiptoes and hooked his arms over the edge of the tank, using the pen to part the creature’s lips.

Small, needle-like teeth grinned at them. Removing the pen, Blanc raised his eyebrows at Marta.

“Awfully small,” he remarked.

“Yes,” said Marta. “Very small. About the size of the puncture wounds. But is it venomous, whatever this — _thing_ is?”

“No,” said Blanc, settling back on his heels, hands in his pockets once more. “This _thing_ is a caecilian. A type of reptile, perfectly within Mr. Fiona’s purview. Non-venomous.”

Marta bit back a curse. 

“But it _did_ bite Mr. Cecil,” Blanc continued, “and it also bit Mr. Fiona. And that is how he died. Come, Watson.”

Marta didn’t bother to bite back the next word which came to her lips, which was only, “Ugh.” She followed Blanc through the reptile room and out the side door, which led into the Fiona family house. Julien and the police officer were still in the sitting room.

“Mr. Cecil is a passionate herpetologist himself,” said Blanc as they came through the door. Julien looked up, startled, and answered automatically.

“Yes. He is.”

“With a particular passion for vipers,” Blanc said. He pulled his phone from his pocket and handed it casually to Marta, who furrowed her eyebrows as she read through the list before her. She passed it on to the policeman, who almost passed it to Julien, corrected himself, and gave it back to Blanc. 

It was a complete bibliography of Mr. Liam Cecil, all of it centered on venomous snakes and vipers.

“Couldn’t bear it if one of your brother’s vipers were destroyed,” Blanc said to Julien, “could he?”

This time, Julien didn’t answer. His lips were pursed, his face lined.

“And of course, they _would_ be destroyed, if it were discovered one of them bit and killed their owner,” Blanc said. “Luckily, none of them did, though the toxicology report will of course show venom in Mr. Fiona’s bloodstream.”

He stepped forward, and for a moment Marta thought he was advancing on Julien, but Blanc stopped a yard away and instead put his hand on the policeman’s shoulder, leaning down to speak in his ear.

“Have we got Mr. Cecil in custody?” Marta heard him ask.

The policeman gave an almost imperceptible nod. Without preamble, Blanc went on.

“Mr. Cecil’s love of vipers does not extend to the snake’s ugly step-cousin, the caecilian,” he said to Julien. “That much is clear also from his bibliography. Interestingly, a caecilian was found dead in the reptile room — toxicology pending.”

“Fuck,” said Julien softly, wringing his hands.

“No doubt,” said Blanc. “Watson, put the donut together for me.”

 _Fuck,_ Marta thought. She threw her brain into overdrive and opened her mouth, expecting only so much bullshit to come out.

But what came out instead was rather an elegant solution, much to her surprise. The jigsaw pieces were fitting themselves together inside her head.

“Liam Cecil extracted venom from one of the vipers under James Fiona’s possession,” she said. "He pried open the caecilian’s jaws — getting himself bitten in the process — and rubbed venom on its teeth. Shortly after, the caecilian, now poisoned, started showing symptoms of illness, and Cecil pointed them out to his partner—”

Julien flinched visibly at the word.

“—who naturally approached the caecilian and examined it,” said Marta, “getting himself bitten, like Cecil, in the process. Only for James the bite was fatal, and for Cecil it was not. It didn’t matter to Cecil if the caecilian died, too, so long as James did and all his vipers were safe.”

“And why,” Blanc reminded her quietly.

“And why he did it,” Marta continued, “is because James planned to sell some of his menagerie to a Swedish herpetologist, Dr. Ilse Svinhufvud, whose work James greatly admired and cited often in his own papers.”

In her mind, she heard Lieutenant Elliott protesting, _Weak sauce._ Before Blanc had the chance to say anything similar, Marta hurtled on.

“Furthermore,” she said, “James had reason, recently, to change his will. Didn’t he? Firstly, because as things stand, his vipers go to Cecil — but since he’s recently offered them to Ilse Svinhufvud, who will certainly accept them, he has to update his testament to specify which snakes Cecil gets and which he doesn’t. And secondly—”

This was the gamble. Professional hairdresser, she reminded herself. That flinch earlier. Polished nails. Trump 2020.

“Secondly,” she said, taking a deep breath, “James is the eldest twin and the owner of this house. When your parents died, he had his will made up leaving the property to you, didn’t he? But that was when you were both twenty-two. He didn’t know you were gay at the time.”

Julien’s face twitched. 

“Bigotry,” Blanc tsked, shaking his head in sympathy. “Naturally, you were more than willing to collude with Mr. Cecil. Who could blame you? You get your parents’ house, Mr. Cecil gets your brother’s snakes. Elementary.”

“Elementary?” Julien repeated, his voice hoarse.

Benoit caught Marta’s eye. His lips twisted in a smile. She did her damnedest not to smile back in front of a man who would very soon be under arrest.

“Elementary,” Marta said.

* * *

“You put me on the spot,” she said later, after the policeman had driven Julien away. She and Blanc sat on the hood of his car in the Fiona family driveway, watching a string of detectives and forensic technicians move in and out of the greenhouse.

“I did,” said Blanc, “and you handled it marvelously, I daresay.”

The spring wind blew a strand of Marta’s hair into her face. She brushed it away absently, eyes on the house. Beside her, Blanc fished through a Tupperware container with a plastic fork, picking at what looked to Marta like a fantastically wilted Asian salad.

“I could have bungled it,” Marta said.

“I knew you could handle it,” said Blanc with a dismissive wave of his fork.

“I could have gotten it wrong, though.”

He only shrugged; he couldn’t seem to spear a chow mein noodle with his plastic tines, so he trapped it against the side of the bowl and used the fork to leverage it up and into his mouth.

“I could have made us both look like idiots,” Marta persisted.

Blanc didn’t answer for a moment. After he’d chewed and swallowed the chow mein, he said, “Detectives frequently look like idiots. So do murderers. They tend to overlook your initial mistakes once you tumble to the truth.”

“Still…”

“Still,” said Blanc, “down one path, Marta gets it wrong, so what? Down this path, Marta got it right. Down yet another path, Marta Cabrera is a murderess; down this one, Marta is the best damn Watson that Benoit Blanc has ever had. You like mandarins, Marta?”

Lips parted in confusion, Marta looked down and saw a mandarin orange balanced on Blanc’s plastic fork.

“Can’t stand ‘em myself,” he said, eyes twinkling. “Go on.”

Marta leaned forward, intending — well, she didn’t know what, exactly. Because the moment she leaned forward, Blanc leaned _in,_ lifting the fork to her lips, and without thinking she opened her mouth and took the mandarin orange between her teeth. Citrus juice exploded over her tongue and Blanc smiled down at her, and—

And down some other twisting path, Marta grabbed the fork herself, and down yet another, Marta said, “Of course you like mandarins, you made this salad yourself. What are you playing at?”

Down this path, in this present, Marta allowed Benoit Blanc, last of the gentleman sleuths, to feed her.

Blushing, she tucked another strand of wind-blown hair behind her ear. She looked back at the bustling greenhouse; beside her, Benoit returned to his salad, still smiling, privately amused.

“You’ll join me on future cases, won’t you?” he said casually. “If time and your busy schedule allow?”

“ _El_ _jardín de senderos que se bifurcan,”_ Marta said, and eyed Blanc, a smile of her own twisting her lips. “I see the significance now.”

For the moment — just the moment, of course — she decided to keep him in suspense.


End file.
